The program involves matching young uniformed officers with veteran detectives in an effort to make a big dent in neighborhood crime.

Authorities say the suspect shattered rear windows of at least 25 parked cars in Jackson Heights before jumping head first into the vehicles and taking whatever he could, and several of the incidents were caught on surveillance video.

“At the beginning of every tour, we would come in, and it wasn’t a matter of if a car got broken into, it was how many cars got broken into,” Officer Tyler Scala said.

Scala and Officer Brian Leibold are part of the new NYPD unit that pairs promising young police officers called Neighborhood Coordination Officers (NCOs) working in small defined neighborhoods to form relationships with people there.